Homebrew technology: Love letter meets jewellery

Nothing says “I love you” like jewellery – and this jewellery does it literally.

Thanks to a new design by Cheng Xu, a student in tangible interactive design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you can forget whispering sweet nothings into your lover’s ear&colon; your beloved can now wear your words as earrings instead. Xu’s invention, called Speaker, turns spoken words into jewellery with a hidden meaning.

A user speaks into a microphone linked to an Arduino microcontroller that analyses changes in volume. It controls several small motors that push and bend a wire to represent the sound of the user’s words&colon; effectively acting as a real-time jeweller.

Xu says&colon; “The wire speaker started as a project in response to the question, ‘How do we interactively make things in the era of digital tools?'” The original prototype was put together using toy car wheels, but Xu has developed a more sophisticated design, which was showcased at Maker Faire at the weekend. The popularity of the device with children at the Faire suggests to Xu that it could work well as an educational tool, as well as a device with encourages other people to get creative.